Lumia

Instagram for Windows Phone is just a few weeks away, Microsoft and Nokia have confirmed, with the much-anticipated photo sharing app one of a range of new titles for the platform. The Facebook-owned title joins Xbox Video, Flipboard, and a number of Nokia's homegrown titles launching alongside the Lumia 1520 and Lumia 1320 today, with ESPN F1, EA Sports FIFA 14 and Temple Run 2 also incoming for the platform.

Nokia is readying its next Windows Phone update, Lumia Black, which will build on Microsoft's GDR3 with a number of new features for its existing WP8 range. The new software will bring features like Nokia Camera, which pulls together the previous Nokia Pro Camera and Smart Camera apps into a single interface, to the company's older devices, after it debuts on the Lumia 1520 announced today.

Here's one more bit to add to the growing Nokia Lumia 1520 checklist, this time indirectly coming from Nokia itself. One of the company's Chinese partners has inadvertently leaked some of the hardware and pricing details for Nokia's rumored phablet.

Nokia will bundle Netflix streaming video access with new purchases of the Lumia 1020 on select carriers, it's reported, with the media subscription aiming to sweeten the deal in the competitive UK market over the holiday period. Purchases of the 41-megapixel Windows Phone on carrier Vodafone UK will get a year's use of Netflix bundled, the Financial Times [registration required] reports, while at least one retailer, Phones4U, is offering six months of Netflix on a range of Lumia handsets.

The Nokia Lumia 2520 has gone by several names in the past - most recently "Sirius" - and is now being rumored to appear with Verizon first (and perhaps exclusively) in the third week of November. This bright red machine has been tipped several times to be appearing with Verizon at some point or another, coming up quick with a 10.1-inch display and no less than Windows 8.1 RT. That's the kicker - it will almost certainly be bringing on a new edition of Windows, but with the tablet-aimed RT attached to the end.

With incremental updates for HERE maps on Nokia devices, the company takes away the pain of downloading the entire massive bulk of an offline map and makes it tiny. An update to Nokia's offline maps system this week makes updating an offline map to your phone as simple as updating any normal app. Just as you'd update Angry Birds to get a few new levels, so too can you update your maps for offline use in just a tiny, incrementally updated file.

Nokia has taken to its Twitter account this morning, sending off a tweet with an October 22 date and the promise of more information to come on that day. Accompanying the tweet is a picture of a couple individuals in the desert skiing, as well as an assortment of hashtags. If all is as expected, we'll likely be seeing the Lumia 1520 launch on that date.

With all the hoopla surrounding Microsoft's purchase of Nokia's mobile business, leaks of an aborted Nokia Android smartphone, or talks of a Nokia Surface tablet, it might have been easy to forget another rumored Nokia device that is, to some extent, probably closer to reality. But now we're receiving details of the Nokia Lumia 1520 phablet that's set to land on AT&T really soon.

Earlier today, word surfaced that Nokia had developed an Android handset before the Microsoft acquisition negotiations began, and now new sources have appeared telling of a Microsoft Surface Phone handset. Reportedly, Microsoft had built multiple prototypes of its own Surface handset, something that ultimately never came to be.